Mission "Defragmentation". Page 6

In this article we’ll discuss if defragmentation can be used as a performance test for hard disk drives. We will also see how the time it takes to perform a defragmentation procedure depends on the Native Command Queuing technology support. 16 hard disk drives participated in our test session.

Quiet Mode on Hitachi HDDs

Additionally, we tested a Hitachi drive with enabled quiet seek mode to see how its performance would differ in comparison with its standard operation mode. So, we copied the test partition to the HDT725050VLA360, changed the operation mode using IOMeter and performed the test.

The speed reduction is quite clear, amounting to 5.8%. On the other hand, it is not too big. Every HDD from Seagate notches the same 24 minutes in its normal, not quiet, mode. Mark this if you want to keep your computer as quiet as possible.

Conclusion

Areal density and firmware algorithms are the factors that determine the time it takes to defragment a hard disk. The amount of cache memory and the spindle rotation speed influence the speed of the process, too, but in a lesser degree since most products available today have the same amount of cache (16MB) and the same spindle speed (7200rpm). Considering the current prices, there’s no sense in buying 8MB models unless you are searching for the cheapest HDD for an office computer or as a backup device, i.e. when the price factor is of primary importance.

The number of platters, to our surprise, has almost no effect on the defragmentation process.

The winners of our today’s test are the 500GB Samsung HD501LJ and Seagate ST3500630AS and the representatives of the more serious and speedy category, Western Digital’s WD740ADFD and WD1500ADFD.

We hope Seagate will make its other drives as fast as the leader among them while Western Digital should take note that its drives are among outsiders when it comes to defragmentation.

To our surprise, the defragmentation process took longer with enabled NCQ, even though not by much. We are going to return to this problem later on, but we’d want to ask for your opinion – which defragmenter should we use next? Write to our forum, please.

If you try to keep your home computer quiet, take a look at Hitachi’s HDDs. You can reduce their noise greatly by sacrificing some 5% of performance.